Delhi

Cathy receiving warm hair oil. Very relaxing.


We had a week in Rishikesh while Cathy had some daily massages followed in the evening by some training with a professional masseur. The warm oil pouring from a suspended pot, swinging from side to side over the hairline she said was particularly relaxing. The oil kept on being recycled, and Cathy said she went into an unusually deep relaxation state. On the 2nd day of this, I went and photographed the setup. Since money takes precedence over everything in India, the hapless patients had to get their drips etc out in the narrow passageway. The only sour note was that when she went to pay, the erstwhile Doctor Singh upped the price from what he quoted by 2 and a half times. Not this little black duck. I placed the agreed sum (about double the fee at a proper Thai massage school which provides many more hours training) in an envelope, wrote on it the actual quote, the amount of service actually provided, and the amount of the contents and marched down to his rooms where the evening training took place. He obliged without demur - which to me was an acknowledgment of his own wrongdoing. India is just full of cheats and liars who are eager to fleece anyone but particularly foreigners, and they are usually quite skilled and experienced at it.
Be that as it may, we left the lovely Ganga river at Rishikesh and headed down here to the May Heat. It had been quite cool with unseasonal rains, but that is now a memory as the thermometer rises. According to the web, it is 39 today and "feels like 45", which it does. We have been utilising the new Delhi Metro - a clean modern underground rail line. This morning we went to Old Delhi and the enormous Red Fort. Before the British destroyed most of the interior after the 1857 Mutiny, it had been described as the most magnificent palace in the world. Even what is left is pretty amazing, although left to crumble and decay in a typically Indian manner.
As I write Cathy is on her way to the domestic airport to fly to Kolkata en route to Thailand, so there might be 2 bloggers writing here over the next few weeks. I'm off to catch up with an old friend from Melbourne who now lives at Ujjain, where it may be hotter than here, on my way back south.